


Trini Garcia and A Study In Victories

by bible



Category: Fury (2014)
Genre: Also he kisses Coon-Ass so read it, There is a lack of Gordo love in this fandom, This is all about Gordo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-02-28 01:57:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2714723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bible/pseuds/bible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoiler alert: America wins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trini Garcia and A Study In Victories

"Just put on my grave, ' _Here lies a brown man killed fighting yellow men to protect white men_.'"

\- Anonymous

* * *

I. Boyd

Chicago, Illinois. January 1942.

Trini winced as a plane -- a passenger flight -- flew overhead. First was the sound coming from above, growing even louder. It was a huge, heavy rush, suggesting immensity, a great parting of air. Gordo's head craned back. The plane seemed longer than two and a half football fields and as tall as a city. It was putting out the blue winter sky.

Not three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the world was strung tight with paranoia. Fear was inescapable, and the heartland of the war was _his_ own destination. The draft had not been gentle, even with the patriotic men squeezing bodies yet to be trained into the registration office, eager and rage-filled. "Remember Pearl Harbor!" seemed to be the cry of the week. Hell, Trini didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was _located_. He took a guess it was somewhere in Oregon before the papers wept.

Trini drew on his tobacco and sent his prayers to heaven, watching the men in their uniforms enter the base that contained his future. _Left, right, left._ Trini husbanded his smoke before casting it skyward, watching the foot traffic thin out and reading the seconds off his pulse. In his peripheral vision, ancient branches gathered.

_I will die unknown, a brown mark in the ground, crushed under the treads of a Panzer, the letter's response gathering the tears of my family and nothing more. I will fight my best fight. I will give up. I do not want to be here._

Every variation he came up with had the indelible mark of "Trini Garcia's all done." He was already creating a hell in his mind, a halo of crumbled smoke culminating above broken, mashed bodies, skulls crushed and one dead face indiscernible from the next. Trini thought he could detect the beach landing of a major headache at the back of his head. 

Trini jerked, checked himself over like a leper. There was a dark speckling on his right sleeve. Particles of his wife, Brie, on his right side. Brie was always on his right side. Trini never let Brie drive. She was from New York, and had driven a car three times in her life. 

"Hi."

Forming a fist, he placed his hand to his lips, and swallowed down the schizophrenic thoughts. He was not a mentally inept man, certainly clear-headed his whole life, with his aims in sight. He blinked rapidly, and the blood on his sleeve and the branching trees and the storms of smoke dissipated from his mind. He stared at a young man with a mustache and eager, if worn, eyes. He was white.

"The fuck you want?" Trini asked defensively, stepping back. Little frat boys like him had done unspeakable things to grown brown men.

"You look like you got shell shock and you ain't even been in Germany." His mouth cracked in a grin. He had white, straight teeth, a clear sign of his medical privilege.

Trini turned hostile on reflex, his fingers clenching at his sides. "You here to make fun of me 'cause I ain't jumping at the idea of killing men, like you are?"

The boy tilted his head. He eyed Trini with careful precision. Immediately, Trini felt uncomfortable, as though he was scrutinizing him, compartmentalizing him to a disturbing degree. "I'm not making fun of you. I want to work with you."

Trini's brows rose. "Why?"

"I'm scared, too," he said, and offered a hand. "Boyd Swan. We'll make it back."

This discussion reminded him of an alien time zone. Trini tentatively took his hand and shook. He didn't put any strength into the grip. No smart man showed even a quarter of his capability in the first meeting. Boyd's hold was limp as well. He was intelligent. Gordo didn't detect venom, but no kindness hid cruelty, he supposed. He'd be wary around this young man. "Sure, kid. We'll make it back, and I'm fuckin' the queen of England."

"You're wife's lovely." Boyd was eyeing the picture he had tucked into his shirt pocket. His wife, a head taller than him, was peeking over the cloth as if greeting Boyd. Interracial couples were frowned upon, but Boyd looked wistful in his gaze.

Gordo laughed.

"You are the strangest white boy I've ever met and we been talkin' for a minute. But, hey. Thanks. She's a good girl."

Boyd stepped back, and looked at him seriously. He looked skinny in his new uniform, wrists thin as they protruded from the loose sleeves. "We'll see her again."

Trini pretended he believed him.

* * *

 

II. Don

Western border of Tunisia. May 6, 1943.

The series of battles started in the Axis Powers' favor. The end of it had more than 230,000 prisoners of war in the hands of the Allies, children and adults alike, blood caked and war weary, swastikas on their forearms. The Americans cheered and drank after the success, smashing bottles over particularly evil German heads, using bodies as target practice. Some kind-hearted men, Boyd and the like, shielded the children from the view, but did not coddle them. They simply redirected them to the camps.

Gordo didn't feel all that good. ( _Gordo_ , now. Not Trini.) _"What's 'fat' in Spanish?"_ Red had asked, nursing a bottle of whiskey three months ago. Trini laughed out his new war name.

In the baking hot spring, Gordo brought the back of his hand to his forehead, and wiped away condensation as he maneuvered Fury along the damaged streets. His skin glittered, and sweat darkened the cloth of his uniform. Debris of broken and defeated men scattered across the ground. Trini felt uncomfortable in the driver's seat. A constant juddering sense of being in the wrong vehicle. He hoped that the long drive would retrain his brain a little.

Past the strangely denuded storefronts that were once budgeted to surveil drug traffic. Past their base's warning sign, this morning sound-tracked by the gunfire snapping of happy Americans testing out bullets instead of taking rest.

And then out, into the territories of others.

Gordo drove with the unit's radio on. He would rather have driven with music, but he'd learned to appreciate army-band chatter as its own kind of sound structure. So he rolled with the waves and eddies of crime and its management as he drove. More reports on the grim hand-to-hand battle of Enfidaville. Gordo had crushed men with a grit jaw. Literally. Blood splattered Fury's body, painting her a deep crimson, machinery bathed in death. Don had stroked her afterwards, copper-red coming up on his palms, adoration in his eyes.

Mother and daughter found stabbed to death, reporting officer commenting that they were so holed and smashed they looked like ragged wet blankets.

Coon-Ass chattered unrelentingly about death and sex.

"Stop the tank."

Don's voice, quickly drowned out by responders to a mid-town location where a German had apparently doused a pregnant civilian in gasoline and set her alight when she didn't give him whatever he had wanted.

 _Because it's all about what other people want_ , Gordo though as he threaded his way though Africa and its bodies.

"Stop the fuckin' tank, Gordo."

"Roger."

Fury was alone. The infantry she'd rolled with was either in hell or on their way. She came to a stop on the intersection of a market and a gazebo, destroyed and soot-stained, sad plants wilting beneath its wooden rot. A vase of peonies was aflame. An enemy body slumped across the shattered floorboards, hand limp on a loaded gun. A young girl in a white, shift-like dress had strays of hair tossed over her pale, almost-pretty, cocky features. Her eyes were pale in the strange, yellow light, one leaking blood. Trini swallowed hard. Half of her body was blown off, the threads of her cloth were burnt, charred at the ends, like a napkin set on fire. Opening the hatchet, Gordo lifted himself from it as Don instructed him to. He instinctively looked down at his best friend before climbing out.

Red gave him a cocked brow from the assistant driver's spot, and slumped into his seat with a noise like he was sinking into a warm bath. His eyes fluttered shut. One track of his cheek was clear of grime, where a tear-drop split it. Trini gave his hand a squeeze, then let it go and fell into the world. 

Outside, the air was pungent with death. The distinctive clay-salt smell of burning hair and iron-scented blood wafted among the warm breeze. Don and him both grabbed hand-weapons, Gordo's sore fingers clamped around the handle, his thumb cocking the hammer on instinct.

Don approached him and looked him over. "You need to sleep."

Gordo rose an eyebrow, and said nothing.

"You know what happens'a men who don't sleep. Lose their damn minds."

"I ain't lanked."

"Sure you're not," Don gave him a glacial stare, and Gordo felt steel and iron in the pit of his stomach. "Maybe not. But you're in your own mind. I need you to stop that. Understand me? You fuckin' understand me? I'm not gonna allow your lack of focus to ruin us."

"You don't know what's goin' on up here," Gordo tapped two fingers to his temple. "You don't know how this feels for me. You think you do, 'cause we in the same tank. But you don't."

Don motioned for him to explain, lips tightening. Gordo took a deep breath and wracked his jacket for a cigarette. Harvesting one, he rubbed the nicotine scum on the top of his mouth, then placed it between his lips and lit up. Ash sparked in a grey flurry. He inhaled a warm stream of smoke and let it sliver out of his mouth in a bone colored cloud. "You ain't got kids. You ain't Mexican. You don't see Germans killin' the non-Aryans first, you don't see the smashed heads of children the way I see it. You ain't got shit on me. I think I've earned the right to mope a little."

There wasn't a moment of hesitation when Don seized him by the hair and plucked the cigarette from his mouth, crushing it beneath his heel. His lip twitched up to reveal his teeth in a vicious snarl. Gordo thought of a provoked rottweiler. The follicles on the back of his head gave a excruciating tear. Gordo cursed explosively.

"You think you're allowed to feel sorry for yourself? You think you can mope in front of these men?" He motioned to Fury. Shooting a glance at the tank, he eyed Boyd, who looked like someone took a dump on his birthday cake, and a smirking Coon-Ass, slunk over his hatch opening. Red wasn't a particularly nosy man -- or he was watching through the viewer.

"Do your job. Do what you're here for. You think--"

Rustling to his left.

Gordo lifted his arm and took a shot. Don's jaw snapped shut, his head swiveling to Trini's outstretched hand. The rifle was pointed at the German beneath the gazebo. The distinctive smell of led slid through the festering stink of death, and fresh blood permeated the skies. It was a wet noise as it slapped along the ground. There was staggering from the soldier, his mouth opening. Blood leaked down his chin, his eyes turning up one more time as he realized this was the last sound he'd make.

He screamed, and bled, and fell, and was no longer interesting.

The gun he was loading clattered to the floor. Gordo hadn't even looked from Don when he killed the bastard. 

Don's grip loosened. He took a breath through his nose. "...Good shootin'."

"Ain't lanked."

There was a silence that stretched between them before Don's mouth spread in a beatific grin, like an old wound opening. He laughed, long and loud, and let Gordo go. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Ain't lanked."

Gordo grinned as well, brought the back of his hand to his mouth to hide his own smile. It wasn't that funny, but he knew Don and him would look at each other in the middle of the night when they were on watch, and Don would whisper 'ain't lanked,' and they'd have to stifle laughter in order to not wake the others. An inside joke. Don stepped back. The radio requested they stop their surveillance and return to base.

Wardaddy clapped a heavy hand on Gordo's shoulder. One more glance to the German. The little girl bypassed his vision completely. _Stack 'em up_ , he reminded himself. "Get some sleep."

"You first, motherfucker. You first."

* * *

III. Coon-Ass

Sicily Island. Summer of 1943.

There was a time when Gordo and Coon-Ass didn't take turns with women. It changed in Sicily.

Boyd and Don sat side-by-side in the town center, Don with his head turned upward, inhaling sea-salt, the cool breeze whipping his hair across his face. Boyd read his Bible carefully, thumbing through the pages. After Operation Husky, everyone seemed borne by an equatorial current, the beaches of silt sand littered with relaxing soldiers celebrating -- again -- a victory. Don's legs outstretched on his makeshift seat, his bare heels in the warm sand. His fingers intertwined over his belly, his head tilted back, nose facing the sky as a breeze tossed strands of his hair across his forehead. Boyd licked his fingers and turned the sheet-thin pages of his worn bible. He could play his fingers beneath the pages and make out the shape of the prints.

A British fighter pilot drove his plane in a celebratory loop overhead. After being cheered down the Sicily coast, it slid through the sunset, into darkness and silence, and across midnight.

But peace wouldn't linger, and Coon-Ass made sure of that. The hatch opening was obscenely loud along the gentle crash of the sea, a mechanical clack among nature's soundtrack. An inventive and obscene curse spilled through the tank, before Grady's head appeared, like an animal creeping out from its protective hatch once the predator left the premises. His face was dappled with blotches of red, moistened with sweat, anger marring his brow. Boyd looked up from his book and covered his grin with his palm, his teeth glinting beneath his mustache. 

Coon-Ass clambered out, lost his footing and slid down the tank, falling on his ass. Another particularly dirty, blasphemous word erupted from his throat.

"The fuck?" Don said, snapping his eyes open and turning to face Grady. 

Lieutenant Parker, a handsome young man with a beard, faced Wardaddy and rose his eyebrows, tilting his head towards Grady for explanation. "He drunk?"

"Naw," Don exhaled, "Just fuckin' _stupid_."

He cupped both hands around his mouth. On cue, Gordo exploded with laughter somewhere inside the tank. "What the fuck are you doing, boy?"

Boyd shook his head, licked his thumb and went back to reading. Grady scrambled to his feet, obsessively scrubbing his mouth with his fingers. "Fuck. Ah, fuck." 

The water curled in smooth rolls along the coastline, crashing among rocks and sugar-colored sand. Grady's head swiveled towards the beautiful sea and his legs carried him to it in an awkward limp. Dropping to his knees at the shore, he dipped his hand in the effervescent foam and scooped it into his mouth, garnering a quiet 'what the fuck' from Don. He gargled and spit out a long, syrupy line, exhaling loudly. 

"We got water, dumb-fuck!" Don yelled to his brother in arms. Grady flipped him off the same time Gordo appeared from the tank, stretching out sex-loose limbs, his smirk of satisfaction prominent on his mouth. Following him was a sun-stained, Italian woman in a red dress that ended at her ankles. Her lipstick was smeared. Bible looked to her, then to Coon-Ass's wilting erection and bit down on another chuckle.

Don watched as Coon-Ass pointed an accusatory finger at Trini. "Fuck you."

"Well..."

Coon-Ass placed both hands over his face and whined. Don pointed at the both of them. "You either work out whatever the hell happened or shut the fuck up. I don't got time for your personal problems."

Boyd closed his bible, and held up a hand. His voice carried interest interlaced in the deceptively soft tone. "Wait, wait. I want to hear this."

Don cocked an eyebrow, then searched his pockets to produce a cigarette. Boyd leaned forward and rose a brow.

Uplifting a curled fist, knuckles whitening, Coon-Ass let a threat spill past his lips, his brows lowered upon his face. "Gordo, I'ma slap the brown off'a you."

Boyd lifted his own hand, and shot him a look a stern mother might adopt. He rose one brow and then turned back to Gordo. Successfully quieting Grady, he said, casually, "What happened?"

Gordo broke out into mad laughter, and began his tale. The entire monologue was studded with threats from Grady and shushes from Boyd, snorts from Don and intermittent laughter from Trini. Gordo settled in front of the two men, sitting Indian style.

"You don't know how many Italians I wanna fuck. That's the first thing you all need to know. There's so many beautiful women on this country."

Don clicked his tongue, " _Also_ , our enemies."

Boyd mimicked his noise, " _Also_ , that's how you get the clap."

" _Anyway_ ," Gordo shot the both of them a look, then a grin split his face once more, "There's a bar a couple stores down, still runnin'. Happens that most of the citizens here both like capitalism and sex. Ain't nothin' like it, bunch of Italians grabbin' Americans by the lapels, tipping back whatever alcohol they got. Because they know they gonna die soon, they just gonna live while they can. And there's music blaring, there's sex everywhere, we just won. Why not dive into it? I mean," he looked between Don and Boyd, "Maybe you two don't understand. You two a little... queer."

Don stood. "Pardon?"

"Odd. Don't know why you're not fuckin' anyone right now when you got a whole array of ladies waitin' for you."

Boyd leaned forward. "Celibacy," he counted on his hand, "Respect. The clap."

"Man," Gordo clicked his tongue, "Shut up. What's with your and genital health, huh? You have it before?"

"Nope. I just know _I'll_ be the one to treat it in case any of you start askin' what the lumps on your balls are."

Grady guffawed. Gordo upheld a hand. " _A_ nyw _a_ y," he repeated again, stressing the vowels, "Me an' Coon, we drinkin' good beer, real sweet, tastes like apples. An' we both feelin' real good. It's all warm inside, everyone acting like we won the lottery. We're happy men again. And this girl, twenty-two, twenty-three shows up. Long black hair, ass like a stripper, red dress and make-up, and she lookin' at the both of us and she asks us to buy her a drink. Which we both know means, 'Fuck me senseless.'"

"She knew English?" Boyd asked.

"Naw," Grady said, "She clicked in tongues: 'Buy me a martini.' _Yes_ , she knows English."

"Coon-Ass," Bible said, with serenity lining his voice, "I'ma kill you."

Gordo continued. At this point, everyone had reclined in the sand, Coon-Ass rubbing his temples; Wardaddy only mildly invested, his eyes scanning the shoreline obsessively, fingers curling on his knee. Bible had his chin propped upon his wrist, smile upon his lips. "We get her a drink, and she asks to play pool with us. And she's bending over, and Coon and I look at each other and we already know who gettin' the pink and who gettin' the stink."

"Oh, good Lord," Boyd said, his face sliding into his palms. "Charming, y'all. Real charming."

"A little visual," Don added. Then he grinned, "So who got what?"

Coon-Ass rose his hand. "Ass."

"So we play pool, she drinking, we drinking, and then she's all, 'Let's go somewhere private.' And me and Grady, we ain't the sexiest men. Well, I am. But we know she got it hot for soldiers. And we take her to the tank, and she doesn't expect it to smell like Bible's B.O."

"Ain't that bad," Boyd said.

" _Wash_ yourself," Grady pointed at him, "Ain't biblical Jerusalem no more. So she comes in, she's gagging 'cause of that smell, and that's pretty hot already."

Don shook his head, "Y'all ain't got no shame."

"So we strip her, we fuck her, and we goin' pretty hard. And--" Gordo laughed madly, Coon-Ass' ears burning. But he was smiling behind his palms, his head shaking. A man wasn't a man until he could poke fun at himself. "And we both lean in to kiss her. Coon's gonna kiss her ear, I'ma kiss her lips. But she turns away, screams, 'No mouth herpes!' And it's too late. Me an' Coon're kissin', and it ain't even small either, it's all sensual and we both for our eyes closed, and we gettin' into it, before Coon goes--"

He put a hand on his middle, tears in his eyes.

Coon-Ass finished for him behind his own broken chuckles, red to the roots of his hair. "I say, 'bitch, you one hairy lady.' And Gordo says, all high-girly-voice, 'it's 'cause I'm Italian.' And that's when I open my eyes."

The camaraderie laughed until Gordo farted. Then they laughed harder.

**Author's Note:**

> Love Gordo. He's important.


End file.
